Our Manifestos

With the mind-boggling degree of innovation occurring in digital technology and networked media, it’s very easy to forget that, in commercial terms, we are still only talking about markets. And markets are still just made up of people. The other commercial task that hasn’t changed is the need to deploy resources to work within the marketplace to realise specific aims effectively. Such as building sales and keeping shareholders content. What is changing, as every marketeer worth his Cluetrain now knows, is the nature of that marketplace. However, these changes are still yet to be fully reflected in the marketing industry because the most important cog of the business - media finance - continues to lag the trends driving networked markets. Big marketing shekels remain driven by two words – reach and frequency. An approach akin to asking as many people as possible out on a date until one or more of them falls for the smooth new chat-up line. And this view of the world is all about size. Bigger. Louder. Harder. The problem is that in the new marketplace this approach doesn't build relationships - it wrecks them. Of course, awareness is absolutely vital for any brand, particularly a new one. And there’s always going to be a need to get out the big guns out and fire away at the marketplace to remind the world that a brand still means business. But consumers (aka people) are fed up with brands only offering them a one-night stand, time after time. Just think about the financial services industry where enticing offers are sprayed around, only for the love to be slowly withdrawn once the deal is done. The bank’s rate of interest gets lower and lower until it just fizzles away and the corporate desire for new accounts on the bedpost grows. Which leaves consumers more cynical and determined to stay footloose. Or to become ‘rate tarts’ as they are tellingly known by the industry. For brands to break this Tiger Woods lifestyle, they have to change not only their ways but also, crucially, their means. And that means a very serious redistribution of their cash. For if a corporate or brand is only in town occasionally for a night out on the campaigning tiles its long-term reputation suffers. These days consumers see reliable brands as being there for them 24x7 - when they need the help and support. And how can a brand do that if it spends its marketing wad on the first night? It’s not easy changing long-standing behaviour. But unless brands spread their love, attention and cash throughout the year, and are able to hold some back to respond to people's demands, no one will believe their clever words and lovely promises. In the world of marketing and brands, the size of your wad still counts. But in marketplaces driven by networked media, people are more interested than ever before in how you use it.

Second Life is still going strong and its latest 'Economy Wrap-Up' shows how sophisticated it has become: 'Here's a look at 2009 - through the lens of the US dollar value of gross earnings made by Second Life Residents during the year.
In 2009, Second Life Residents in the aggregate earned approximately US$55 million in real money, growth of 11% over 2008. This represents the sum of all US dollars transferred "out" of the Second Life economy by Second Life Residents, and into PayPal accounts, and then to bank accounts and wallets. We call this figure "Gross Resident Earnings" and it represents the sum total of processed credits for Second Life Residents.
This works as follows: when a Resident business accumulates a Linden dollar (L$) balance through the sale of virtual items or other economic activity, they can sell their Linden dollars to other Residents on the LindeX or the Xstreet SL Exchange, creating a US dollar credit on their account. Note that we are not including activity from third party exchanges as LindeX and XStreet SL exchange comprise greater than 90% of credits processed.
When a Resident with a US dollar balance on their account moves that balance to PayPal, we record and track that amount as a "processed credit." Taken as a whole, "processed credits" are a reasonable proxy for Gross Resident Earnings, as they represent surplus Linden dollars gathered by a Resident business and turned into US dollars.
In 2009, US$45 million of "processed credits" came from Second Life accounts and US$10 million came via Xstreet SL accounts. Note that many Xstreet SL merchants also have significant inworld businesses, and use Xstreet SL to collect earnings from their inworld businesses as well as their Xstreet SL businesses, accounting for the fact that processed credits on Xstreet SL are greater than the volume of the Xstreet SL Marketplace and Xstreet SL Exchange.'

Alan Rusbridger, Editor of The Guardian : "BookArmy – though it avoids saying so – is an offshoot of Harper
Collins. The two enterprises point in completely different directions.
As it was explained to me, the point of BookArmy is to get as many avid
book readers engaged as possible and learn as much as possible about
their likes and dislikes. At some point in the future (the theory goes)
publishers will no longer need to spend a fortune on marketing Max
Hastings’ next book by lavishing money on Waterstones or in print. They
will go to BookArmy and say, 'We know you have a database of the 80,000
people in the country who read books of military history. We’ll give
you our targeted marketing spend instead.' BookArmy is a telling illustration of two aspects of the digital world. One is the ability of digital disrupters (in this case, even within the
same company) to take one bit of a newspaper and do it with a
conviction, range, depth and passion that a portmanteau print-based
newspaper cannot match, especially in digital form. It is the
unbundling of newspapers. And the second is the only hope of
matching the power of the these digital disrupters is to harness the
same energy and technologies which they are using.' See the rest here. Excellent insights from a man right in the middle of the change being created by networked media.

At the beginning of last year, I helped put together an event at NESTA, where I detected for the first time an undercurrent of suspicion about social media and particularly social media consultants. I remember the room recoiling at the suggestion that anyone in attendance was a social media advisor. Perish the thought! And again, at a bash I helped out with at the IPA, there was plenty of good discussion about social media. However, also the same concerns. As illustrated by this film - 'The Social Media Guru'. Well worth a quick viewing if you haven’t already. Since then, Business Week has advised wariness about ‘social media snake oil’, reporting that, ‘Critics complain that many of the new experts have adopted an orthodoxy that provides little flexibility for differing situations—or outcomes. Their pronouncements follow a rigid gospel : Be transparent, engage with your customers, break down silos.’ Which has led oneortwo social media consultants to defend their practices as both professional and good value. So why is this? Is it just a case of caveat emptor applying to a new market as much as any other? Or a natural backlash against the relentless hype of new social widgets and the rise of Facebook - the social world’s own 800-pound gorilla? Personally, I wonder if this suspicion is because it’s not yet clear what role social media will have in the broader communications industry - particularly for brands. At that IPA evening, the interesting part of the chit-chat, for me at least, was exactly on this issue. Are we talking interesting new...

A while back I suggested that the web was NICE - New Infrastructure, Culture and Economics. Well we’ve had a revolution in the first area with the arrival of broadband and superfast groovyware and in the second with the rise of the share-and-compare economy. This year I think we'll see changes in the economic aspect of my NICE notion. The problem with the desktop internet was that it didn’t come with a swipe card machine. In the early days of e-commerce, paying online felt like handing your keys to a stranger in the street and asking him to park your car. However, the world has changed. Facebook delivers shopping tips from our friends, the pocket browser is becoming the norm, your phone is developing a sense of direction and we all want one-click commerce. In short, the conditions for economic innovation look ripe. And, of course, this year money is in short supply so commercial ventures need to be, err, commercial. I have no idea what shape this economic change will come in. Other than that it may appear quite strange. For example, how do you fancy sharing your credit card purchases on Twitter? A step too far? Not according to Philip ‘AdBrite’ Kaplan, whose service Blippy, lets you share actual purchases with your social network. Kaplan makes it sound like the obvious next step, not an open invitation to the world’s cyber-villains: “It’s just another way of saying, 'Here’s what I’m doing,' or 'Here’s where I am,' or 'Here’s a band that I’m really into' — obviously, because I just bought five of their albums." Or how would you feel about letting your phone choose your lunch spot on the basis of who’s offering the best local deal? The raft of mobile coupon start-ups aim to turn internet traffic into retail footfall. Kerching! Then there’s Jack ‘Twitter’ Dorsey’s Square service, which turns your phone into a credit card swipe machine, meaning anyone can retail. Or check out mobile payment services GoPayForIt and Zong, the latter of which hopes to mobilise the FaceBook Credits service. Both aim to make micropayments a cinch. As ever, these Shiny New Things are only where the story begins. The end game maybe odd-sounding newvirtualcurrencies, such as China's QQ economy, where bits can be turned into regular cash and used to buy (or steal) everyday items. Or can even be taxed!
The share-and-compare economy is booming and traded opinion is increasingly the key to purchase decisions. The maturing of digital economics may turn this opinion data into the new ‘rivers of gold’ that the media industry so desperately seeks. Or maybe it will generate more Etsy-style traders whose business is based not on people hitting a ‘Like’ button on Facebook but a ‘Buy’ button on their smartphone.

A Grand Fromage from a big agency network broke the advertising omerta with me over coffee the other day. ‘Of course, we’ve never really been able to link campaigns to sales or ROI’, he whispered. Let me tell you, I nearly choked on my almond croissant. It’s the unwritten law among GF advertising executives that no one mentions how random the effect of brand advertising is. When under scrutiny from client procurement executives the Big Ad industry has ensured success by rounding the wagons and sticking to the BARB-Nielsen script, or pointing to the latest Thinkbox research. However, just as I was getting over this blatant breach of the rules another industry GF broke the code! Writing on his blog Steve Henry blurted out that: 'I'm getting sick of saying this, but 90% of advertising goes out there and does nothing at all. (I heard a figure the other day for what the average ROI is for marketing in this country. I can't tell you the figure because I've been sworn to secrecy for now - but it's diabolically low)'. What’s going on? Maybe it’s just a case of a few loose tongues. They’ll probably disappear next week as the Farm St lawyers hand out the super-injunctions. However, maybe, just maybe, it’s because a few brave souls have noticed that technology is slowly making the mass marketing argument impossible to maintain. For forever and a day, any ad executive worth their salt could deliver - with feeling - some variation on: ‘Maximum reach-and-frequency is the only way to build brand awareness thus creating equity that drives sales.’ Which paved the way for vast media spends that in turn justified chunky production budgets and maybe even an exotic location or two. However, as all media, including TV, is slowly sucked onto one IP platform or another, thereby becoming highly measurable, the black box that the marketing industry used to keep its metrics in has been exposed to the digital sunlight. The battering ram of reach-and-frequency is being replaced by granular laser targeting. First there was Google and its ‘database of intentions’ where only people who were searching for something were targeted with related commercial messages. Then came the rise of applications where people could choose content to run on their social networks, iPhones, iTouches and now Droids. More recently, we’ve had Facebook and its ‘people not pages’ approach, where advertisers can target individuals who have expressed a particular interest through their profile. Even the impregnable metrics maze that has driven TV’s vast global revenues has begun to open up. Social networks make it all too easy to see what people are actually watching – and what they are not. And finally, the promise of behavioural advertising looms large, where commercial messages are targeted according to the digital data trails that people leave behind them – not thrown over the nation like a blanket. Now these developments do of course bring their own Big Brother issues. But that can all all wait. The Grand Fromage of advertising are finally taking notes. And a few are talking outside of the old school too...

David Weinberger captures the complexity of networked markets: "Traditional markets consist of demographic slices, i.e., “social
groups” of people who have never met one another. We choose particular
demographics because we think they are susceptible to the same message.
Thus, traditional markets are not real things to which we send
messages. Rather, messages make markets. Now, markets are networks…networks of people who converse and
interact, spread out across the Internet. For example, at any one
moment there are some number of parents with sick children who are on
the Net talking and posting, on blogs, discussion boards, social
networking sites, Twitter, etc. etc. etc. But that networked market is
substantially different in 12 hours because their kids are getting
better. And of course 12 hours is an extremely long periodicity for
these networked markets. They change constantly. Think of how ideas
ripple through Twitter. Furthermore, not everyone in the market of
parents with sick kids are in it the same way. The illnesses vary, the
seriousness of the illnesses vary, the relationships vary. Think about
the gay network in this regard: I’m sometimes in this network because I
blog about gay marriage. But if you, as marketer, fail to recognize the
complexity of the interests in this group, then you’ll be sending gay
dating solicitations to people who don’t want them, including some who
are in this network because they’re posting homophobic comments.
Networked markets are rippling, ever-changing, hugely complex,
inherently unstable, and thus thoroughly unlike traditional markets. In short: You can’t step into the same market twice."

One of the remarkable, recurring themes of our times is how an individual can take an idea onto the web and, often through the power of naïve enthusiasm, accidentally force a billion-dollar media industry to rethink everything it does - whoops!. This, of course, is what happened when Shawn Fanning unleashed his college dorm project – Napster - onto the world. Devastating the music business wasn’t Fanning's goal. He just wanted to help his friends find their favourite tracks more easily. But the Big Labels never recovered and even though Napster wasn’t the only P2P service offering music downloads, Fanning became the unfortunate public enemy number one of the powerful RIAA and its crazed legal battles. Then came Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, a P2P protocol that allowed people to share large software files online more easily, by breaking them up across networks of participants’ computers then making them easy to find and reassemble. Rather than relying on one machine to sit at the centre of a network and do all of the hard work. Such was the success of Cohen’s brainchild that at one point BitTorrent was thought to account for one third of all internet traffic. The result was the disembowelment of the movie industry’s distribution model and the eternal wrath of the MPAA. However, like Fanning, profits didn’t seem to be Cohen’s motivating factor. The only visible source of income from the BitTorrent project has been the T-shirts he has sold to its fans, emblazoned with the slogan, ‘Give And Ye Shall Receive’. And now we have Justin Kan, creator of Justin.tv. Kan’s original experiment in 2007 involved wiring himself up to a mobile camcorder that streamed live onto the web. His motivation was to let people create their own ‘livestreams’, with the undercurrent ideal that CCTV shouldn’t be available only to the authorities. However, Justin.tv has quickly developed into a service that allows anyone to create a live TV channel. Today the site attracts more than 41 million visitors per month and has 428,000 'channels'. Some of which are dull feeds of people sitting at their desk working, others are vibrant niche channels of hobbyists. However, a few are feeds of live sports events that individuals are uploading from their paid subscription services, complete with community tools such as chat. Sound familiar? The difference may be that Shawn Fanning and Bram Cohen were the pioneers who taught the legal profession that the world has actually changed. And Kan’s service is already joining a burgeoning,web TV ecosystem. For instance, Fanning financed his project with the help of his uncle while Cohen had no commercial aspirations at all. However, Kan’s project is supported by Silicon Valley’s respected technologist Paul Graham and his fund Y-Combinator. The fly-in-the-p2p-ointment is that live events, particularly sports, are meant to be one of the last bastions of broadcast TV’s superiority. So it seems unlikely the industry will just sit on the sidelines. However, the trend of passionate individuals unknowingly wreaking havoc on global industries continues. And Justin Kan looks like he might just be the next innovator to keep media executives' heads spinning.

The $500bn global marketing industry is driven by metrics. TVRs, GRs, OTS, TGI, ABC, BARB, CPC, CPA, PI, CPM, frequency, benchmarking, response, reach, hits – the range of measurement systems has exploded as the complexity of marketing continues to increase. Which has led to a gaming mentality among some parts of the industry, where almost any activity can be shown to be successful. If it looks like a campaign isn’t working it doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. It means you're standing in the wrong spot. However, in the share-and-compare world of personal media, social networks and communities, it’s simply not possible to game the system. If you’ve created a Facebook page, or an online forum, or an all singing-and-dancing app fest with mobile bells and whistles simply begging to be API’d and distributed around the widget world, no level of metric analysis will demonstrate success if no one joins in the fun. Any figures you try and flaunt to justify the activity will be drowned out by the sound of silence as the wind whistles through your Twitter feed, swinging the doors on the hinges of your silent social experience. No level of metrics will disguise the fact that No One Is In There. And should you try and lay a little Astroturf or sock up a few puppets, you are likely to discover that your conversational marketing takes on all the allure of a bowl of plastic fruit. Now whether this is of any significance depends upon your viewpoint of where the marketing world is headed. I chaired a little social gathering down at the IPA a couple of weeks ago where Mark Earls put the case for a connected, networked world being a sea change for every part of the communications industry. While others declared social to be a welcome new ingredient to the already murky marketing soup – but no more than that. Just DM and WOM for a new era. So if you’re with the Herdmeister then the fact that the game is up...

Freddie Laker (no not that one) gets to the nub of the matter: "Sometimes I like to talk about the "paradox of marketing.”
As marketers we feel obligated to get our clients/brands where the
eyeballs are. We then descend on that thing like vultures and in most
cases we destroy that thing we originally loved and saw as an
opportunity to reach consumers. (Think George from “Of Mice and Men”
with the rabbit.) We’re currently in the process of killing Twitter as
well. The next great mobile
revolution will be focused on the culmination of social networks,
geo-location services, content creation/sharing, augmented reality and
the functions that come with rapidly increased bandwidth, such as live
streaming video. My fear is that marketers will be irresponsible and
will use these technologies to pound consumers with horrible
interruptive ads that make consumers revolt against mobile marketing.
We’ve already had epic failures with some marketers’ mass SMS
broadcasting and then the totally idiotic idea of connecting to
discoverable Bluetooth phones when they’re in proximity of a broadcast
point. There’s so much new
technology that has the potential to redefine interaction between
brands and consumers, but unfortunately too many of us are still using
advertising techniques that we’ve used for the last century — and they
are primarily disruptive in nature. The “techies” have done a
great job of continuing to innovate and evolve the medium. Now it’s
time for marketers to show the same passion for innovation and evolve
with the medium, rethink our approaches and be respectful of the most
intimate of digital touch points. We’re marching into holy ground with
mobile marketing and if we’re not careful a select few of us will ruin
it for the rest of us and this time, I don’t think consumers will be as
forgiving." (Via Heavyset).